Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 15:28:05 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: johang@algonet.se (Johan Granlund) Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: A new twist on the reboot problems Message-ID: <199607262028.PAA18823@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <199607261949.VAA10211@hermes.algonet.se> from "Johan Granlund" at Jul 26, 96 10:44:02 pm
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> > > matter what gets written, or not written, before the machine > > > freaks out, and before fsck "cleans" everything, you have it all > > > logged on a separate machine. > > Once upon a time there was a beast called teletype. > > I miss them. Teletypes suck. They are old, slow, clunky, noisy, and eat great quantities of paper. They cannot be accessed from remote, you cannot bring up their output in an X11 window and use cut-n-paste. A small FreeBSD based console manager box would have none of these flaws :-) (However you could not take a baseball bat to the FreeBSD box without fear of hardware failure). It would be particularly efficient at dealing with a larger number of other boxes, 1 < n < 10. For anyone who is interested, I should have a prototype set up shortly. What I plan to do: Set up small FreeBSD box. With a large disk. And a modem. And its own Kerberos domain, and encrypted telnet. This will allow me to log in remotely or locally, in a secure fashion. Stick in a multiport serial card. Connected to the COM1: serial ports of other FreeBSD machines, running comconsole. Set up a user, "consmgr". Install "screen" and "kermit". Set up /etc/rc such that "screen" is kicked off on ttyv4 as user "consmgr". I explicitly do not wish to do this out of /etc/ttys. This is just to initialize the system after a reboot. Set up "consmgr" user's account such that "screen -d; screen -r" is executed upon login. This means essentially that consmgr will have a virtual session active for as long as the box is up, and as long as the admin is careful not to kill a session.. Set up kermit scripts that open a unique log file and connect to a specific port (i.e. a remote FreeBSD box's console). In consmgr's .screenrc, automatically kick off each kermit script in a different window. Now we are flying. I can log in from anywhere in the world, via Inet or modem, or on console, securely, and access half a dozen other boxes' consoles, review their console output, etc. With a little work, the box hosting consmgr could be outfitted with reset-button outputs for the other boxes, or power controls, etc. That would not be out-of-the-box technology (although you COULD use xtend if you were desperate for a quick solution).. UNIX: the flexibility to leverage off of an apparently unrelated set of powerful tools to do something cool. ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/546-7968
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